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The Khan Academy – nothing to do with training Star Trek villains, everything to do with supplying thousands of tutorial videos – is moving into computer science, and it looks like it’s bringing a similarly engaging teaching style to coding as it did to mathematics. Before we get too excited, though, let’s remember that it shares a few of the problems traditional schools have with teaching computing.

It seems that, increasingly, it’s programming that’s being taught in classrooms, rather than just teaching kids how to use Word, Windows, Internet Explorer etc. Focussing solely on learning to code though, as with the Khan Academy tutorials, is risky – children might learn the knack for writing for Linux on Raspberry Pi, or Lego Mindstorms, but will those programming languages be around in the future? Will command-line, hard-edged programming still be a highly-saleable skill 20 years from now?

What might be more important is not becoming fluent in programming language, but teaching the logic needed to program. Logic is also how we control, confront and perceive the broader world – we infer patterns, we repeat actions, we make decisions. If you can get kids to learn some basic logic, you’ve taught them not only how to start programming computers, but also the ‘real’ world.

It’s never too early to start teaching logic, and I’d get kids coding by high school at the latest. My five-year-old will start with basic computer coding soon, but mostly, I’ll be teaching my kids about using logic to solve problems. And that can be done with piles of bricks and logs just as well as any computer.